Analytics, Film, and Thoughts on the Future

Monthly Archives: December 2014

The NBA’s Detroit Pistons are increasing their professional scouting abilities by deploying four full-time pro scouts to different parts of the country. They file thousands of reports on players, so that when a move needs to be made, or even just when scouting the opposition, the GM or Head Coach can simply pull up recent reports on players or teams. Some will say that too many scouts can be a bad thing in terms of communication, but I don’t think any team has reached the point where that would be a concern. What this is really doing is maximizing the eye test. There is a recognition that the metrics we have to measure things are far from perfect (even more so in hockey), but rather than combine them with occasional viewings or going off of reputation, you can employ scouts to watch virtually every game. It’s a system that makes a lot of sense and one that NHL teams with the means should immediately explore.

A large feature of analytics is a focus on process. It involves dissecting the thinking behind decisions more than the decisions themselves, since there is so much variance involved in outcomes. There are so few large decisions that ever come our way, and by evaluating process you can filter out that variance. One of the problems with fans assessing coaches and general managers is that we either judge based on outcomes – which is faulty because of the impact of that variance – or we attempt to get inside the heads of people whom we likely have never met, and whom all we have to go on is decisions themselves, media reports, and press conferences.

The Bears today fired Head Coach Marc Trestman after a very disappointing 5-11 season marred by locker room controversies after coming into the season with Super Bowl aspirations. General Manager Phil Emery was also let go, the man who had hired Trestman two seasons ago. The decisions were completely defensible. For a team with this much talent to perform so poorly was simply unacceptable, and there wasn’t anything to suggest a turnaround for next season in the last few pitiful weeks of the season.

When I started this blog, I made sure to apologize for the fact that there would be some non-hockey/non-analytics/non-sports content, and I’ve realized lately that I haven’t followed through on…you know…what I apologized for. It’s a well-known fact that many sportswriters like Bruce Springsteen. I don’t know why this is other than to say he’s amazing, so I’m not sure why everybody doesn’t. I’ve had the opportunity to attend one full Springsteen concert (3h45 mins in length) and he’s simply the best there is live. But even beyond that, his imagery and lyrical abilities are both excellent, and having read his biography I can tell you that there are a lot of fascinating stories behind the music he’s written that make me appreciate him even more as an artist. With that, for those interested, here are my picks for the Top 10 Springsteen songs. These are objectively correct and beyond reproach, but feel free to comment/tweet your own faves so that I can tell you whether or not they are acceptable choices.

Micah Blake McCurdy (a good follow on Twitter here) has been posting division projections for most of the season, and today he explained how his model works in more detail. While his work doesn’t account for injuries, goaltending, special teams, or shot quality, I still think it’s one of the better projection models I’ve seen and is certainly useful. After all, he’s proven it works pretty well using past seasons. The most interesting passage from the article (read here) though for me was this:

The NBA’s Sacramento Kings, who recently fired their head coach despite a not-horrific start by their standards, are rumored to be looking to try a new system that, were it successful, could completely change the sport’s dynamic. You can read about it here, but essentially the Kings are looking to play a four-man zone-style defense, which would involve one player consistently focusing on offense – a cherry-picker, if you will. Now as the article points out, the reality of the situation may mean a 5-man defensive unit but one man designated as a breakout player who immediately sprints up court whenever the opposition takes a shot. It’s a very interesting idea and it should be noted that this isn’t the first time the Kings have done something innovative.

Phil Birnbaum, who is one of the great non-hockey analytics writers out there, has taken a number of stabs at the shot quality question in hockey over the last couple of years, and today weighed in on the Tom Tango controversy.

The issue – whether to weight goals significantly higher than other shots in corsi analysis – is one I’ve stayed relatively quiet on, and that’s simply because like any good jury, I want to see all the evidence presented before coming to a decision. We’re still not at the point where I’m totally confident evaluating the worth of Tango’s statistic, or the merits of shot quality overall, but I think that’s partially because the answer depends on the question we’re trying to answer. Does shot quality matter? Absolutely. Does it render large sample shot differential metrics useless? Nope. Can it be used to improve on what we have? I think it can. As Birnbaum has often pointed out, we know that shot quality impacts shooting percentages because we see it in score effects. Is it possible a team could play a system in which they more resembled a team down a goal than a team in a tied state, thus impacting shot differentials and shooting percentages? It’s possible, although it’s important to note that there are psychological factors involved in score effects, as well as the other team playing a certain way. It’s not just one team that impacts it. It also seems quite plausible that teams make the conscious choice to forego shot attempts in order to try for better shots. I think the Ducks are a team that have done this the past couple of years, and the Leafs may be as well. Those changes aren’t enough to impact the idea league-wide that more shots = more goals, but on a team level it could. This is where the sniff test comes into play. We may not have the statistics to prove such decision-making exists, but that just means we have to try harder to find them.

DC’s own Tony Kornheiser, of Pardon The Interruption fame, came out yesterday and said that he feels the best next step for the dysfunctional Washington Redskins is to embrace analytics, to try and do to football what Billy Beane did for baseball. His reasoning is one which I think should be used to convince front office personnel more often, even if it’s a risky approach: “How much worse could it get?”

If you’re a team, and this applies to any sport, that hasn’t made the playoffs in a number of years, that doesn’t exactly look poised to take the world by storm, isn’t it worth doing something unconventional to turn the tide (non-McDavid year category)?